reading Loaves and Fishes by Dorothy Day

Quotable and challenging:

The world would be better off
if people tried to become better,
and people would become better
if they stopped trying to become better off.
For when everyone tries to become
better off
nobody is better off.
But when everyone tries to become better
everybody is better off.
Everyone would be rich
if nobody tried to become richer,
and nobody would be poor
if everybody tried to be the poorest.
And everybody would be what he ought to be
if everybody tried to be
what he wants the other fellow to be.

-- Peter Maurin, "A Case for Utopia"
(quoted in Dorothy Day's Loaves and Fishes 26)